Seeking Feedback

[russelljd]

For a few years the church has operated under a file naming standard that produces filenames for digital audio and video available over the internet like these:

ENSN_2007_09_09_AshtonMJ_OneForTheMoney_00609_eng_009.mp3
GC_2008_10_400_Complete_SundayMorningSession_04903_eng_.mp3
GC_2008_10_401_NowLetUsRejoice__04903_eng_.mp3

We have received feedback that these filenames are too long and have a lot of information that is not meaningful to users. When this filename standard was created it was created under the premise that no two files would have the same name so that theoretically someone could download all of the files into the same directory and this not have conflicts. When considering how we could shorten these filenames, we came to the conclusion that we had to eliminate this premise in order to come up with shorter filenames.

We are proposing a new standard that would change the above filenames to these filenames:

0009-one-for-the-money-eng.mp3
0400-third-general-session-eng.mp3
0401-now-let-us-rejoice-eng.mp3

Where the first segment is a four digit number used to sequence the files, the middle segment is the title, and the last segment is a language code. All of the data that was previously available in the filenames will still be available in the metadata. We feel that this is a good solution that takes care of all needs.

We would like your feedback about these new filenames. Do you see any possible problems users may have? Is there anything we are overlooking?

Thanks,
JD Russell
Web Media

[mkmurray]

To me, it looked nice to have some of that extra data in the name. For instance, it appears Conference talks would group together and Ensign articles would group together. Not only that, but they would sort chronologically as well. The programmer in me sees this naming schema as glorious!

But that's likely only good in your operating systems file explorer. Within an actual media manager application, I imagine it would make more use of the metadata attributes for organizing, tagging, and sorting. Many of the newest operating systems are beginning to guide users toward "document libraries" based on tagging instead of groupings by folder structure.

Sorry, it's not much as far as advice, but just some thoughts that come to mind.

[MorettiDP]

Since I use a vast number of directories to save data from Church websites (PDFs, MP3s, etc.) to me the filename isn't so important. But I like the old version because can help put order in files if a user uses a same directory to some different files.

[JamesAnderson]

We still need the year code before the numbers shown, like 2009-0401, and the reason is just in case there is an exact positioning of something with the exact title, like the example of the hymn given. It is not uncommon for, during General Conference for example, for them to choose to program the same hymn in the same position in the program, given they prefer to use very well-known hymns a lot there.

Occasionally, a title of a talk or something will repeat also, although that one is a little more less likely.

[russelljd]

We still need the year code before the numbers shown, like 2009-0401, and the reason is just in case there is an exact positioning of something with the exact title, like the example of the hymn given. It is not uncommon for, during General Conference for example, for them to choose to program the same hymn in the same position in the program, given they prefer to use very well-known hymns a lot there.

Occasionally, a title of a talk or something will repeat also, although that one is a little more less likely.

This scenario will most definitely happen. For example, in recent history the President of the Church has always be the third track in every General Conference (two hymns and then the the opening remarks are given.) But this is made a non-issue by the fact that we have changed our assumption from being that all files will be stored in the same directory to be that all the files for each General Conference (and every other event) will be stored in separate directories. To state that more clearly, we have made the assumption that each General Conference will have to have its own directory.